This is a paper I gave at an IBBY Australia seminar on April 2 2005, celebrating Hans Christian Andersen's 200th birthday.

In his book Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, US academic and writer Jack Zipes writes, “Almost all critics who have studied the emergence of the literary fairy tale in Europe agree that educated writers purposely appropriated the oral folk tale and converted it into a type of literary discourse about mores, values and manners so that children would become civilised according to the social code of that time.” This is, perhaps, a reasonably familiar idea for those of us here today, even though we also know that fairy tales have been regularly attacked over the centuries, even and perhaps especially to the present day, for being too violent and frightening for children. In 1903, a German-language education manual for parents, Dr. Karl Oppel's The Parent's Book: Practical Guidance for the Education at Home, expressed the common objection to fairy tales thus:

Many fairy tales fill the imagination with horrible images, with terrifying figures and by this they lay the foundation of scare and fear and of the nervosity that is so frequent these days. Is it a wonder, if the child does not want to stay alone in the dark—there in the corner sits that terrible man-eater, whets his large knife, leers at him with his terrible eyes and growls: "I smell people's flesh." Why Philip cannot get to sleep? Can you blame him, listen! step, step, step,—doesn't there that terrible monster ascend the stairs, that wrings the neck of children, and sucks their blood?

The kinds of changes made to fairy tales over the years in order to make them more suitable for children—or rather, more suitable for anxious adults wishing to protect children, who at the same time recognising the potency of these stories, and their necessary place in the literary lives of children—have been well documented and are not the particular interest of this paper today. Instead, I will be talking to you today about a body of re-tellings of fairy tales which, far from shying away from the darker, violent, frightening and even sexual aspects of the tales we are familiar with, actively embrace and interrogate these aspects of the fairy tale—and they frequently do so in novelisations either written/published specifically for, or frequently recommended to, young adult readers.

I’ll just pause here to say that my interest in this subject comes from my current post-graduate work at Macquarie University. I am writing a dissertation on YA retellings of fairy tales, a topic I settled on after changing my mind at least three times about the topic I wished to write on. I won’t bore you with these earlier topics, nor why I changed my mind so dramatically and frequently. But the reason I finally settled on writing about fairy tale retellings was firstly, because they are books that have given me as a reader, a tremendous amount of pleasure, and because these books are so rich and complex in their interrogation of those apparently so familiar tales that I knew it was a topic I could work with and never lose interest.

As I began my research, one of the first quotes I came across was the one from Zipes, with which I opened this paper. As I said, what Zipes states here is in many ways a truism that will be of little surprise to most people here—that the fairy tale, like all literature for children, has as one of its functions the socialisation of its young audience. But as my focus is on how those fairy tales have been reinterpreted for young adults, the question keeps coming back to me; what, if any, socialising role do these retellings have for their teenage audience? We know that the process of socialising—or civilising, to use Zipes’ term—young people doesn’t end with the onset of puberty, and young adult fiction is also partly about the business of “civilising” teenagers, but at the same time, it’s probably fair to say that by the teenage years, most people have absorbed a large part of those “mores, values and manners” of the social code that Zipes refers to.

So what, if any, messages or lessons about being a productive member of society do the YA retellings of fairy tales carry? Are they functioning to confirm the civilising function of the traditional tales, or are they aiming to subvert this process, to encourage the adolescent reader to question and challenge the “mores, values and manners” of their particular society? And how far can you subvert a fairy tale so that it simply is no longer a fairy tale, but something else altogether?

I haven’t as yet reached any definitive conclusions on any of these questions, but they are, I think, interesting and important ones to ask. And apart from all of this, there’s also the simpler question of why bother to retell these tales that are so well known to young readers through various their literary incarnations, not just the literary tales of Grimm or Perrault or de Beaumont. Fairy tales are made available to children today through children’s magazines around the world, such as The School Magazine, that recognises traditional tales as a core and necessary element of the literature it publishes for primary school aged children in this country. There is the enormous range of illustrated fairy tales available in picture book form, just some of which Robin Morrow will be sharing with you today. Children “learn” fairy tales through cartoons, films, even the dreaded Disney versions, but also the marvellous ones such as Ever After, the Cinderella tale starring Drew Barrymore. So why would anyone feel the need to retell these stories yet again for teenagers?

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©Judith Ridge 2005